“Are you Cooperman?” he asked, paying no attention to his wife’s blasphemy. “I was talkin’ to Irma about you. You know, Irma …”
“I know which Irma you mean,” I said. “She told me you were a good friend of Jack Dowden’s.”
“That’s right. She told you straight.”
“Brian, I thought we talked about this,” the woman in the hairnet interrupted, still testing my foot with the door.
“Dora, let me handle this. Okay?” He pulled Dora away from the door, making a space for me to push through. I moved through the vestibule and followed Brian O’Mara into the living-room. “Dora, be a sweetheart and go get us both a beer. I got a few chilling in the freezer. You drink beer, don’tcha, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Sure. Thanks.” He sat down on the low-slung couch and indicated that I should make myself comfortable as well. I sank deeply into a broad-beamed occasional chair facing the TV. Brian touched a remote-control box and the set went black. From the kitchen we could hear sounds of Dora taking out her fury on the freezer door and the opener.
“Don’t mind Dora. She’s just trying to look after me. It’s just her way.” I nodded my complete sympathy and understanding. He shoved along the couch so that we were nearly knee to knee. Next to us lay a coffee-table with a checkerboard pattern worked in two colours of inlaid wood. There were more plaster game birds in full flight behind me, as well as a genuine oil painting of the Toronto skyline with the whole thing reflected in a black velvet lake. I recognized the CN Tower both right-side-up and upside-down.
“You’re still a driver for Kinross?”
“Sure. Seven years come next April. Jack got me in. I used to haul for Sunderland. Kinross is closer to home.”
“You told the inquest a year ago that you thought that Jack had not been keeping his mind on the job. Did he tell you what was bothering him?”
Brian O’Mara thought about that before answering. He had been giving me the once-over as I sat there leaning back in the chair to increase the distance between us. “Jack was a real careful driver,” he said. “Nobody ever had any trouble with him. He could go twenty-four, thirty hours at a shot without sleep when I first met him. He never gave nobody any Mickey Mouse nonsense. If you get what I mean.”
“But he was worried just before his death?”
“Not worried exactly, but not keeping his head straight. He was, what do you call it? — muzzy the last couple of weeks.”
“That’s what you said at the inquest, but Irma didn’t believe you.”
Here Dora came in with the beer. She dropped the bottles and recently rinsed glasses on the coffee-table for the men to sort out. She gave O’Mara a look that aspired to be meaningful and left us alone again. I poured a very cold bottle into a damp glass, watching the beads of moisture form on the sides as I waited for the head to settle. O’Mara waved his glass at me without saying anything, but I think he intended it to be a toast of some kind; mute, cautious, good wishes. He sipped at his beer, then held it out to look at and made a comment about the first beer after a day’s work that didn’t add to my investigation.
“We were talking about Irma,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, I know. Irma don’t believe that it was an accident. She thinks that us witnesses just cooked up a story and got the coroner to rubber-stamp what we said.”
“That’s about the size of it. Where were you at the time of the accident?”
“I was just coming out of the locker hut with Pegoraro. I heard Jack yell and saw the truck roll into him. He went right under the Freightliner. Just like I said at the inquest. It was pretty gruesome, I’ll tell you.”
“Is Pegoraro still working at Kinross?”
“No. Last I heard he was out in Alberta somewhere, Hinton, I think. He liked long runs, Luigi did.”
“And the other fellow? The other witness.”
“Teddy Puisans? He went back to the old country. Somewhere in eastern Europe. Latvia, maybe. He’d made a pile, never got married. He had it made, and then his mother writes him from behind the Iron Curtain somewhere that she’s sick and can’t feed the geese no more. Just Teddy’s luck. He cut out about four months ago.”
“So, that makes you the only witness to the accident still on the scene,” I said.
O’Mara grinned like I’d just told him that he was the oldest living inhabitant, that he occupied a place of honour, but one that no one would attempt to deprive him of.
“Wasn’t Jack crushed against a cement-block wall, Brian?”
“Yeah. There was a wall there. But by the time I got there, he was under the truck. Look, Mr. Cooperman, we’re talking a whole year ago, right? More than a year. I try to put such things out of my head. The doctor up at the yard told me that it wasn’t good to let my mind linger, you know what I mean?”
“Sure. It’s isn’t healthy, right?”
“Hey, I didn’t mean that! I meant-”
“I know. I know. How wide is the bumper on a Freightliner truck?”
“Huh? Look, ah, they made a few models.”
“You know the one I mean. The one that ran into your pal, Jack Dowden.”
“Yeah, oh, yeah. That one. Well, the bumper runs right across the front, about a foot wide, I guess.” O’Mara was nearing the bottom of his glass of beer. It didn’t appear that it had had a cooling effect on him. His neck stood out red against his plaid shirt, which was hard to do. “Look, Mr. Cooperman, I can’t remember that long ago. I been over it so often, I don’t remember what I saw any more. Honest.”
“Okay, I’ll change the subject for now. But I might come back to it some day. Tell me about the kind of things Jack was talking about around the yard just before he was killed.”
“I told you. Just stuff he shouldn’t have worried about.”
“You mean the waste he was carting?”
“Not only that, Mr. Cooperman. He was talking about how we were killing the Great Lakes and poisoning the rivers and all that stuff you see on the CBC. He was getting to be a broken record every time I seen him. He wasn’t paying attention to his work. And him once the most careful driver around. One time nobody had a better sheet than Jack. No major traffic convictions, no pile-ups, no subpoenas, nothin’.” O’Mara leaned over into my airspace and pushed his empty glass into my chest for emphasis. “I’ll tell you somethin’, Mr. Cooperman,” he said, “I always modelled myself on Jack Dowden. I’ll tell you that for nothin’. There were lots of young guys around the yard, guys that look like they know it all, but they watched Jack like a hawk, let me tell you. If Jack wore a leather jacket, all these young kids would start wearing them too. It was a laugh to see it, but, hey, what a tribute, right?”
“Did you and Jack talk about his environmental worries?”
“I don’t get paid for talkin’! I just go in the office, pull my work order, the waybills and I’m off. I might see Jack for a second hauling his tractor over to a trailer, but more than wave at each other, we didn’t talk.”
“But you told the inquest that he’d been less attentive to his work.”
“Yeah, well. You don’t have to have a conversation to see that he was getting careless.”
“In what way?”
“Well … Hey, you’re forgettin’ this was some fifteen months ago!”
“I’m not asking what he had for lunch; I’m asking what he told you.”
“The talk around the yard was that he was bending everybody’s ears with all that pollution stuff.”
“But he didn’t talk to you about it? Not just before the accident?”
“Naw, the last time we shot the shit was over coffee a few days after he was a finalist in the National Roadeo Championships in Toronto. Jack could haul a rig through the eye of a needle. Then we talked again. Where was it now? Must have been that truck-stop called The Fifth Wheel near the Hydro Canal fill. About two miles from Niagara Falls.” I made a mental note to look the place up on a map. O’Mara went on. “He told me about the books he’d been looking at and explained about the chemicals we were hauling. We never asked questions about that kind of thing. We’re paid to drive, not ask for information we won’t understand anyway. Besides, it’s an old story in this business: the less you know, the safer you sleep. You know what I mean?”